Marin Ireland is one of the finest actresses working today—a chameleon who’s comfortable in virtually every type of role (as evidenced by her recent standout contributions to Y: The Last Man and Justified: City Primeval) and who’s particularly well-suited for horror. Her headlining turn in Bryan Bertino’s The Dark and the Wicked is nothing short of phenomenal, and she once again demonstrates her scary-movie bona fides with Birth/Rebirth, a chilling riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in which she stars as a “mad scientist princess bitch” with a monstrous professional impulse—and biological imperative—to create new life.
The impressive feature debut of director Laura Moss, Birth/Rebirth (in theaters Aug. 18, and afterwards on Shudder) reimagines Shelley’s classic tale through a modern feminine perspective, focusing its attention on two women brought together by fate and bonded by kindred maternal instincts.
A pathologist at Bronx Memorial hospital, Rose (Ireland) is cold to the point of cruelty, her eyes stern (and ringed with dark circles), her expressions icy, and her every utterance a case study in dismissive, heart-heated curtness. Embodied by Ireland with a frosty severity that’s frequently amusing, she may be the least friendly person alive. At least on the surface, that makes her the polar opposite of Celie (Judy Reyes), a single mom and OB nurse at the same medical facility who’s kind to her patients and loving toward her daughter Lila (A.J. Lister).
Co-written by Moss and Brendan O’Brien, Birth/Rebirth commences with blurry shots from an unknown woman’s POV in an ambulance and on an operating table, where her baby is born (under tremendous distress) and she passes away. At this early stage, Rose and Celie are juxtaposed as, respectively, remote and compassionate caregivers. Appearances, however, can be deceiving, and Moss slowly reveals their similarities courtesy of an unexpected tragedy.
After leaving her unwell daughter with a neighbor—resulting in a departure punctuated by Lila crying, arms outstretched, for her mom—calamity strikes when Celie learns that her child’s malady was graver than originally assumed. In fact, it was a fatal case of bacterial meningitis. Celie’s sorrow upon Lila’s passing is crushing, and it’s compounded by her guilt over having both left the girl on unpleasant terms and secretly relished a phone-in-the-toilet accident at work that had provided a temporary reprieve from her motherly duties.
When Celie can’t locate the whereabouts of her deceased daughter’s body, her suspicions steer her to Rose. Confronting the pathologist at her apartment, Celie makes a terrifying discovery: Rose has kidnapped Lila and hooked her up to an IV and medical equipment. More shocking, Rose claims that Lila is alive, and a simple caress of the kid’s foot by Celie confirms that this impossibility is true.
As Rose explains, this is resurrection not through magic but via science. Using a homemade serum that she’s been perfecting for years and already successfully used on her pet pig (who’s roaming about the residence), Rose has brought Lila back from the great beyond. While the process isn’t complete (the girl is unconscious), it’s nonetheless akin to a “miracle,” and Celie is so thrilled that she immediately sets aside her fury over Rose’s transgressions and agrees to move in and help care for Lila in whatever way she can.
Thus two mothers are united in Birth/Rebirth, with Celie lavishing Lila with love and attention and Rose meticulously analyzing the girl’s responses and brewing a curative potion made from her own biological material. The means by which Rose acquires her serum’s necessary ingredients mark her as a Frankensteinian mommy dearest, at once doctor and monster, and though she’s the aloof flip side to the emotional Celie, both are soon genetically intertwined with Lila. Everything springs forth from a woman’s womb in Moss’s nightmare, whose story follows the duo as they strive to rehabilitate the adolescent—an undertaking complicated by additional misfortunes and, consequently, by the demand to take drastic measures to prevent Lila from slipping backwards toward death.
There are neither jump scares nor gruesome murders in Birth/Rebirth; Moss generates dread through the increasingly harrowing condition of her protagonists and their young patient, whose moans suggest intelligence but also, perhaps, inhumanity, and whose Kubrick-eye stares imply that she may not have returned to the land of the living as her former happy-go-lucky self.
Habitually shooting her characters through narrow doorways and windows, the better to convey their isolation as well as their squeezed-by-circumstance states, the director fashions a sinister atmosphere, aided by intermittent pregnancy and corpse imagery that further casts birth as highly coveted and downright horrifying, full of pain, stress, anguish, mutilation and gore.
Birth/Rebirth is a saga about motherhood in all its various forms—nurturing and callous; euphoric and miserable; gentle and violent; selfless and selfish—and it rests on the shoulders of its stellar leads. Ireland is magnetic as a pathologist at once detached from humanity and insanely invested in preserving (and reviving) the dead; her frigid demeanor and behavior are perfectly contrasted with her zealous commitment to her cause.
She’s matched by the similarly terrific Reyes as a grieving parent who comes to comprehend the ghastly depths of her devotion to her child—a lesson learned, ultimately, through her interactions with Emily (Breeda Wool), who after trying to conceive for years is now expecting her first bundle of joy, and who becomes a source of intense interest for both Rose and Celie. Together, they make for a devious psychologically conjoined pair, compelled to protect their literal/figurative offspring at any and all costs.
“Dignity and motherhood don’t always line up,” says Celie to Emily during a discussion about the hardships of having children at an advanced age, and Birth/Rebirth confirms as much during its final passages, which cleverly reconfigure what we’ve previously seen and, therefore, thought about these two women. Moss’ canny film trades in the macabre yet its real unnerving power comes from its recognition that the innate desire to create is inextricably wrapped up with the need to destroy. In doing so, it proves to be the worthy progeny of its classic genre forefathers Rosemary’s Baby, The Brood, It’s Alive, and Inside.
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